Schott's sporting gaming & idling miscellany
Schott's sporting gaming & idling miscellany, United Kingdom, 2004.
This pack of “quotable playing cards” was conceived and designed by Ben Schott and produced in 2004. Each card contains a quotation pertaining to sporting, gaming or idling – arranged roughly by the following themes:
Aces - winning; Kings - chess; Queens - women in sport; Jacks - cheating; 10s - defeat; 9s - teamwork; 8’s – commentators; 7s – luck; 6s – fitness and exercise; 5s – cards; 4s – golf; 3s – idling; 2s – referees and umpires; Jokers – nuns and cardinals. The pack contains 52 cards, 2 jokers and an information card.
Ben Schott went on to publish Schott’s Almanac which ran in Britain for six editions (2006–2011).
By Peter Burnett
Member since July 27, 2022
I graduated in Russian and East European Studies from Birmingham University in 1969. It was as an undergraduate in Moscow in 1968 that I stumbled upon my first 3 packs of “unusual” playing cards which fired my curiosity and thence my life-long interest. I began researching and collecting cards in the early 1970s, since when I’ve acquired over 3,330 packs of non-standard cards, mainly from North America, UK and Western Europe, and of course from Russia and the former communist countries.
Following my retirement from the Bodleian Library in Dec. 2007 I took up a new role as Head of Library Development at the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) to support library development in low-income countries. This work necessitated regular training visits to many sub-Saharan African countries and also further afield, to Vietnam, Nepal and Bangladesh – all of which provided rich opportunities to further expand my playing card collection.
Since 2019 I’ve been working part-time in the Bodleian Library where I’ve been cataloguing the bequest of the late Donald Welsh, founder of the English Playing Card Society.
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